http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
SO NOW WE ARE FOUR, as along comes Jack, 8 pounds, 4 ounces, to join
Tom, who for the record welcomes this development; and now I know
what my job will be for the remainder of my days. I will be the man sitting
behind the driver's wheel saying: Boys, listen to your mother.

This is a good job, and one of the better things about it is the nice clarity it
lends to life. Fathers (and mothers) relearn that the world is a simple
enough place. They discover that their essential ambitions, which once
seemed so many, have been winnowed down to a minimalist few: to raise
their children reasonably well and to live long enough to see them turn out
reasonably okay. This doesn't seem like a great deal to ask for until you
find out that it is everything to you. Because, it turns out, you are everything
to them.

We know this not just emotionally but empirically. We know -- even
Murphy Brown says so -- that both fathers and mothers are essential to
the well-being of children. Successive studies have found that children
growing up in single-parent homes are five times as likely to be poor,
compared with children who have both parents at home. They are twice as
likely (if male, three times as likely) to commit a crime leading to
imprisonment. They are more likely to fail at school, fail at work, fail in
society.

What, then, would we say about a society in which the overwhelming
majority of children were born into homes without fathers and who grew
up, in significant measure, without fathers? We would say that this society
was in a state of disaster, heading toward disintegration. We would say
that here we had a calamity on a par with serious war or famine. And, if
that society were our own, we would, presumably, treat this as we would
war or famine, with an immediate and massive mobilization of all of our
resources.

Of course, this society is our own. Of black children born in 1996, 70
percent were born to unmarried mothers. At least 80 percent of all black
children today can expect that a significant part of their childhood will be
spent apart from their fathers.

Millions of America's children live in a state of multiplied fatherlessness --
that is, in homes without fathers and in neighborhoods where a majority of
the other homes are likewise without fathers. In 1990, 3 million children
were living in fatherless homes located in predominantly fatherless
neighborhoods -- neighborhoods in which a majority of the families were
headed by single mothers. Overwhelmingly, those children were black.

These figures, and most of the others that follow, come from a report,
"Turning the Corner on Father Absence in Black America," released to no
evident great concern this week by the Morehouse Research Institute and
the Institute for American Values.

As the report notes, things were not always thus. In 1960, when black
Americans lived with systemic oppression, 78 percent of black babies
were born to married mothers, an almost mirror reversal of today's reality.
In the 1950s, a black child would spend on average about four years living
in a one-parent home. An estimated comparable figure for black children
born in the early 1980s is 11 years. According to the research center Child
Trends, the proportion of black children living in two-parent families fell by
23 percentage points between 1970 and 1997, going from 58 percent to
35 percent.

The disaster of black fatherlessness in America is part of a larger crisis. In
every major demographic group, fatherlessness has been growing for
years. Among whites, 25 percent of children do not live in two-parent
homes, up from 10 percent in 1970. Overall, on any given night, four out
of 10 children in America are sleeping in homes without fathers. (True, in
the past few years, the number of out-of-wedlock births has begun to fall,
but that trend is too nascent and too modest to much affect the situation.)

Some people think all of this matters. One is David Blankenhorn, a liberal
organizer who learned realities as a Vista volunteer and who 11 years ago
founded the Institute for American Values, co-author of this week's report.
It is Blankenhorn's modest suggestion that fathers are necessary to
children, that their abdication on a large scale is calamitous to the nation
and that the people who run the nation should do something serious about
this.

The man who currently runs it is not a factor here; he does not do serious.
What about the men who would run it? Al Gore says nothing; he is too
busy fighting the loss of green spaces in Chevy Chase. Bill Bradley
preaches about racism but is silent about the ruination of a race. George
W. Bush is full of compassionate conservatism, but he won't say quite what
that is. And so on. History will wonder why America's leaders abandoned
America's children, and why America let them do so.
either.

Michael Kelly is the editor of National Journal. Send your comments to him by clicking here.